GRIT

Grit -- A Pediatrician's Odyssey From a Soviet Camp to Harvard tells the drama of a teenager and her family fleeing their hometown in Poland during WWII, and after deportation to the Soviet Union, becoming slave laborers, then refugees in Central Asia. Finding upon their return home that all Jews had been exterminated, they emigrate to Sweden. The book brings to life a remarkable young woman who struggles with existential war challenges to help her family survive, while unflinchingly pursuing her goal of becoming a physician. After leaving the Soviet Union, at War's end, she grapples against overwhelming odds to pursue her medical education. Coming to America in 1947, she fights on to finally enter Harvard Medical School. Regina served for many years as a pediatrician in Paramus, New Jersey, before succumbing to cancer in 1973. "This story has all the ingredients of a best-selling novel, yet it recounts real experiences of a young woman, who overcomes the horrors of the Holocaust and its aftermath, and achieves her dream of becoming a physician.... The book should be a valuable resource for the classroom, as well as one for the community in general, to help defeat bias, bigotry and intolerance." Paul B. Winkler, Ph.D., Executive Director, NJ Commission on Holocaust Education "Absorbing and compelling, this memoir provides invaluable insight into a chapter of the Holocaust barely covered in the historical literature: the survival of Polish Jews who fled to the Soviet Union, and the harsh challenges of homelessness and anti-Semitism they faced upon their return to their devastated homes. The memoir makes for exciting reading and will be of interest to people everywhere, particularly to students of WWII and the Holocaust." Atina Grossman, Ph.D. Professor of History, Cooper-Union, NY